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System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems     Oracle Solaris 11 Express 11/10
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Managing Removable Media (Overview)

2.  Managing Removable Media (Tasks)

3.  Accessing Removable Media (Tasks)

4.  Writing CDs and DVDs (Tasks)

5.  Managing Devices (Overview/Tasks)

What's New in Device Management?

New InfiniBand Administration Features

New Hot Plugging Features

x86: Device Detection Tool

Faulty Device Retirement Feature

Device Naming Enhancements

Support for PCI Express (PCIe)

USB and 1394 (FireWire) Support Enhancements

Improved Device In Use Error Checking

Where to Find Device Management Tasks

Managing Devices in the Solaris OS

Power Management of Devices

Power Management of Fibre Channel Devices

About Device Drivers

Automatic Configuration of Devices

Features and Benefits of Autoconfiguration

What You Need for Unsupported Devices

Displaying Device Configuration Information

driver not attached Message

How to Display System Configuration Information

Adding a Peripheral Device to a System

How to Add a Peripheral Device

How to Add a Device Driver

Accessing Devices

How Device Information Is Created

How Devices Are Managed

Device Naming Conventions

Logical Disk Device Names

Specifying the Disk Subdirectory

Direct and Bus-Oriented Controllers

x86: Disks With Direct Controllers

Disks With Bus-Oriented Controllers

Logical Tape Device Names

Logical Removable Media Device Names

6.  Dynamically Configuring Devices (Tasks)

7.  Using USB Devices (Overview)

8.  Using USB Devices (Tasks)

9.  Using InfiniBand Devices (Overview/Tasks)

10.  Managing Disks (Overview)

11.  Administering Disks (Tasks)

12.  SPARC: Adding a Disk (Tasks)

13.  x86: Adding a Disk (Tasks)

14.  Configuring iSCSI Storage Devices With COMSTAR

15.  Configuring and Managing the Solaris Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS)

16.  Managing Disk Use (Tasks)

17.  The format Utility (Reference)

18.  Managing File Systems (Overview)

19.  Creating ZFS, UFS, TMPFS, and LOFS File Systems (Tasks)

20.  Mounting and Unmounting File Systems (Tasks)

21.  Configuring Additional Swap Space (Tasks)

22.  Copying Files and File Systems (Tasks)

23.  Managing Tape Drives (Tasks)

Index

What's New in Device Management?

This section provides information about new device management features in the Solaris release.

New InfiniBand Administration Features

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: In this Solaris release, you can create, delete, and view IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB) data links by using dladm sub-commands, such as create-part, delete-part, show-part, and show-ib. In previous Solaris releases, you had to use a combination of different commands to troubleshooting IB components. The dladm subcommands provide an easier way to manage and troubleshoot IB components.

Types of IP over IB data links are as follows:

On a newly installed system, physical links are created automatically by default. Then, you can use the dladm command to create an IB partition link over the IB physical link. Unlike a NIC data link, an IB physical link cannot be configured, such as plumbed or assigned a IP address for using the link.

For more information on using the dladm subcommands for managing IB components, see Administering IPoIB Devices (dladm).

New Hot Plugging Features

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: In this Solaris release, the hotplug command is available to manage hot pluggible connections on PCI Express (PCIe) and PCI SHPC (Standard Hot Plug Controller) devices. This feature is not supported on other bus types, such as USB and SCSI.

You would still use the cfgadm to manage hot pluggible USB and SCSI devices as in previous Solaris releases. The benefit of using the hotplug features in this release is that in addition to enable and disable operations, the hotplug command provides offline and online capabilities for your supported PCI devices.

For more information, see PCIe Hot-Plugging With the (hotplug) Command.

x86: Device Detection Tool

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: You can use the device detection tool to identify whether your x86 hardware is supported in this Solaris release. For more information, go to the following site:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp

Faulty Device Retirement Feature

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: This release introduces a new device retirement mechanism to isolate a device as faulty by the fault management framework (FMA). This feature allows faulty devices to be safely and automatically inactivated to avoid data loss, data corruption, or panics and system down time. The retirement process is done safely, taking into account the stability of the system after the device has been retired.

Critical devices are never retired. If you need to manually replace a retired device, use the fmadm repair command after the device replacement so that system knows that the device is replaced, in addition to the manual replacement steps.

The fmadm repair process is as follows:

For more information, see fmadm(1M).

A general message regarding device retirement is displayed on the console and written to the /var/adm/messages file so that you aware of a retired device. For example:

Aug 9 18:14 starbug genunix: [ID 751201 kern.notice] NOTICE: One or more I/O devices have been retired

You can use the prtconf command to identify specific retired devices. For example:

# prtconf
.
.
.
pci, instance #2
        scsi, instance #0
            disk (driver not attached)
            tape (driver not attached)
            sd, instance #3
            sd, instance #0 (retired)
        scsi, instance #1 (retired)
            disk (retired)
            tape (retired)
    pci, instance #3
        network, instance #2 (driver not attached)
        network, instance #3 (driver not attached)
    os-io (driver not attached)
    iscsi, instance #0
    pseudo, instance #0 
.
.
.

Device Naming Enhancements

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: The /dev name space supports multiple file system instances as needed. A global instance of the /dev file system is created automatically when the system is booted. Subsequent /dev instances are created and mounted when needed, such as when devices are added to a non-global zone. When a non-global zone is shutdown, the available /dev instance is unmounted and unavailable.

In addition, device configuration is improved in the following ways:

For more information about device configuration, see Managing Devices in the Solaris OS.

Support for PCI Express (PCIe)

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: This Solaris release provides support for the PCI Express (PCIe) interconnect, which is designed to connect peripheral devices to desktop, enterprise, mobile, communication, and embedded applications, on both SPARC and x86 systems.

The PCIe interconnect is an industry-standard, high-performance, serial I/O bus. For details on PCIe technology, go to the following site:

http://www.pcisig.com/home

The PCIe software provides the following features in this Solaris release:

The administrative model for hotplugging PCIe peripherals is the same as for PCI peripherals, which uses the cfgadm command.

Check your hardware platform guide to ensure that PCIe and PCIe hotplug support is provided on your system. In addition, carefully review the instructions for physically inserting or removing adapters on your system and the semantics of device auto-configuration, if applicable.

For information about using the cfgadm command with PCIe peripherals, see PCI or PCIe Hot-Plugging With the cfgadm Command (Task Map).

USB and 1394 (FireWire) Support Enhancements

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: In this Solaris release, both non-removable USB storage devices and 1394 mass storage devices are identified as hotpluggable devices at the driver level. This new behavior means that these devices can be connected or disconnected without rebooting the system and configured or unconfigured automatically without intervention. These changes are made at the kernel level and do not impact the use of these devices. For example, the responsibility of mounting and unmounting these devices is controlled by the removable media management services.

In addition, non-removable USB devices and 1394 mass storage devices can be accessed and labeled by using the format utility. However, you can override the new hotpluggable behavior of these devices by setting the remvalue to true in the /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf file. Setting this parameter to true means that the device is treated as a removable media device at the driver level, if that behavior is preferred.

For more information on using these devices, see scsa1394(7D) and Using USB Mass Storage Devices (Task Map).

Improved Device In Use Error Checking

Oracle Solaris 11 Express: This feature was undocumented previously.

The following utilities have been enhanced to detect when a specified device is in use:

These enhancements mean that the above utilities might detect some of the following usage scenarios:

For example, if you attempt to use the format utility to access an active device, you will see a message similar to the following:

# format
.
.
.
Specify disk (enter its number): 1
selecting c0t1d0
[disk formatted]
Warning: Current Disk has mounted partitions.
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 is currently mounted on /. Please see umount(1M).
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1 is currently used by swap. Please see swap(1M).